


Riddling Reprisals

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Series: Cirque de Triomphe [8]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Corporate Espionage, Earth-3, First Meetings, Friendship, Gen, Hacking, Heroes, Humor, Mirror Universe, Nth Hammer, Revenge, Robots, Tech Industry, also i persist in spelling ed's name with an i, completely inadequate number of riddles sorry, historically inaccurate computers, plot has basically nothing in common with Riddler's Revenge though
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-20
Updated: 2016-06-21
Packaged: 2018-07-16 06:21:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 9,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7255963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Jokester drummed his fingers against the glass mug thoughtfully, Nigma brought both his hands down flat on the table and stood up so he could lean further forward, his pale orange hair sticking up like agitated flames. "Come on! This is the big corporation screwing over the little guy for a profit, and the law playing along. I thought this was what you were all <em>about</em>."</p><p>He slapped a ten down on the table to cover the drinks and turned away, not caring how much attention he'd attracted to their discreet corner of Davis's bar. Jokester snaked out an arm and caught the little man's sleeve before he could get far.</p><p>"Hey, come on, don't go away mad," he coaxed, tugging. "You know how many people have tried to trick me into taking the fall for an assassination, or use me to make a quick buck at somebody's expense? It's like the word on the street is I fall for every sob story I hear."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Edward Nigma had, at one point, worked for Wayne Enterprises. Jokester hardly held that against him; most of Gotham worked for, or in, some Wayne property or other, or worked for people who did, or made a living selling the necessities and luxuries of life to them. Blaming Wayne's employees for the way he went about owning the city would be like blaming the mice that lived in Stalin's walls for the Cold War.

Assuming Stalin had had mice. Everybody had mice, right?

Anyway, J didn't have anything against Mr. Nigma just because he'd worked at WE, but it wasn't exactly a flattering character reference, either. More specifically, and sympathetically, he'd been part of Research and Development, and had lost his job, his home, and his life's work when a difference of opinion over his contract had arisen: Nigma had been quite sure that the language of the contract specifically denied him the right to file patents in his own name for the duration of his employment, but did not prohibit him from working on independent projects in his own time, with a view to possibly patenting them after he'd left the company.

Waynetech felt, on the contrary, that it granted them exclusive patent rights to _everything_ he developed, whether he used their resources to develop it or not. Corporate thugs had seized his private computer from his apartment after Nigma had been unwise enough to mention his hobby work on encryption and high-speed data-something-something to a coworker who was not nearly so good a friend as he had believed.

He had taken them to court, they had counter-sued, no one had backed down; affairs had escalated to criminal charges for breach of contract. Unsurprisingly, since they could afford much better lawyers (including the nearly-undefeated hotshot prosecutor Harvey Dent, who had since become District Attorney), Wayne Industries had won. Lock, stock, barrel, and ten-year noncompete clause. Nigma was left with nothing.

That was where Jokester came in. Nigma wanted his help to steal his work back.

"I mean, I have a lot of the important parts still in my head, though even that I can't legally profit from in any way. But I'm not going to let _them_ have it."

Nigma was a small man and, judging by the few lines in his young face, generally a cheerful one, but as he'd told his story he'd leaned further and further over the round wooden table, trying to impress Jokester with the importance and righteousness of his cause, his round face all pinched with ferocity.

J drained his beer and looked thoughtful, his smile small and crooked. "So you want me in on your revenge?"

"It's not just revenge! They're going to use my coding for weapons development. Yes, I _know_ I did work for them that already went into military tech, but not this. This was special. It's _mine._ "

When Jokester drummed his fingers against the glass mug thoughtfully, Nigma brought both his hands down flat on the table and stood up so he could lean further forward, his pale orange hair sticking up like agitated flames. "Come on! This is the big corporation screwing over the little guy for a profit, and the law playing along. I thought this was what you were all _about._ "

He slapped a ten down on the table to cover the drinks and turned away, not caring how much attention he'd attracted to their discreet corner of Davis's bar. Jokester snaked out an arm and caught the little man's sleeve before he could get far.

"Hey, come on, don't go away mad," he coaxed, tugging. "You know how many people have tried to trick me into taking the fall for an assassination, or use me to make a quick buck at somebody's expense? It's like the word on the street is I fall for every sob story I hear."

Nigma yanked his arm away, scowling. "Why would you even care if somebody was stealing from Wayne?"

"I don't. But I don't like to be used."

The researcher pressed his lips together. "I'm not trying to _use_ you. I just heard you were somebody who might be able to help."

"That's _exactly_ who I am. Now, why don't you sit back down, Mr. Nigma, and tell me the plan."

The scientist looked torn for several seconds, but then he tramped back across the floor and joined Jokester at the table again. Reached into his pocket and drew his hand out covered in a fine, shining mesh worked in a pattern J vaguely associated with circuitry. "This is my cyber-glove. Don't laugh," he added sharply, and Jokester bit his tongue and didn't. He wouldn't have meant anything by it if he had, but some people were sensitive to being laughed at, and Nigma was already feeling defensive, so he didn't want to hurt his feelings.

"It's a prototype I took from the lab right after they terminated me. I replaced it with a dummy, so they probably just think I sabotaged it, but it's made of a material I developed—helped develop, alright, but it was mostly mine, like ninety-five percent mine—that means it's a computer you can wear. It has a built-in radio I can use to access other computers, and it still has all the security keys for the WE network. With this, I can get us through the mechanized security without being detected, and once I access the labs I can make sure they can't use any of what they stole from me.

"But I need your help to deal with the non-computer parts. Are you in?"

J reached across the table and stole Nigma's pint to swig from, since his own was empty. Slid it back with a grin. "I'm in."

Nigma looked a little like he wanted to take back his invitation, but he also looked so _relieved_ that Jokester was half-surprised he didn't melt onto the table. The clown felt a flare of sympathy. Fighting as long as he had, against a titan like Waynetech, all alone—that was impressive, by itself. And J had no doubt that if he'd turned the job down Nigma would have kept recruiting for suitable co-conspirators until he either found somebody or ran out of time, and either way he would have gone in, reckless of consequences.

Bruce Wayne was like Owlman that way, J reflected. Neither of them ever seemed to understand that taking everything from somebody created a person with nothing to lose, and that that was a really stupid thing to create hating you. Especially when the person had been a fighter all along.

The brave little man picked up his beer in a numb sort of way, stopped, and put it down again with great deliberation. Heh. Somebody had germ issues. "Okay," he said. "Okay. Tomorrow night would be best. Can you do tomorrow night?"

"Think I can work you in," J assured him.

Nigma nodded some more. His eyes had gone far away, but not with shock at actually getting something he'd wanted; they were flickering intently over that distance. He was _plotting._ He stood up, pushed a big yellow envelope stiff with papers across the table. "Tomorrow, then."

Jokester nodded, drummed his fingers over the envelope but made no move to open it here. "Oh, one thing," he threw out, as his new B&E buddy moved to turn away from the table. "You have a suit?"

Nigma blinked at him. "A suit?"

"Yeah, a suit! Something fancy, get you into the vibe. You can't do a mission like this in just, you know, sweat pants. Well, you _can_ , but it's just not the same."

"I'm not moving in on the cape game here," Nigma said. "I just want what's mine."

"Capes are nonmandatory," Jokester assured him. "Everything is nonmandatory! I just like to do things with _style_."

"Hm," said Nigma noncommittally.

J held up his hands for peace. Honestly, taking everything so _serious._ "Hey, never mind. I'll meet you in Hopewell Terrace at eleven sharp, huh?"

"Right."

Of course, if his story didn't check out, Jokester would just meet him there to tell him the job was off, but he'd still meet him.

It checked out. The envelope turned out to hold annotated blueprints for the building they were breaking into, which was helpful and saved time, and after calling up a few contacts and making one judicious scouting excursion to make sure they wouldn't run into any avoidable nasty surprises, J went about his usual business for that day and the next—patrol here, gig there; visit Lei Bao and get fed egg drop soup and tea; get into a fight with some of Owlman's lackeys, triumph; stop to gossip with the River Street girls; etcetera.

The next evening he caught a nap around sunset, grabbed a gyro for breakfast-dinner, combed his hair and made sure it was tied back _tightly_ because you never wanted hair in your eyes when you were doing something tricky, and went to meet Nigma in fine fettle.

J got there first, and considered lurking out of sight, for the principle of the thing. Decided against it; the poor guy was stressed enough. He leaned back against the swooping iron pole that held up one of the elegant gothic-style streetlamps City Hall had installed five years ago, everywhere that might plausibly be considered 'tourist-friendly.' The gold braid on his costume winked in the lamplight. He was easily the most noticeable thing on Hopewell Terrace, and he exchanged brief nonverbal greetings with two bleary late-night pedestrians, a pizza delivery girl, and a very sarcastic striped tomcat with a ragged ear, before the person he was waiting for arrived, five minutes late. J's eyebrows shot up as his coconspirator came into view.

Nigma had assembled, from somewhere, a bottle-green tailcoat, neat little buttoned boots, and a _bowler hat._ A real old-school one, stiff and thick enough to offer some skull protection, with the brim pulled down over his forehead until it almost met the green domino mask plastered over his eyes, which in turn matched his waistcoat. It was a spectacularly Edwardian array, especially with the cyber-glove gleaming on his right hand and giving him a sort of futuristic steampunk vibe.

"All right," he declared, as he entered the pool of the streetlight, tugging his lapels self-importantly straight. "I'm ready."

Jokester did a tiny five-step jig as he left the lamppost, and clapped his hands approvingly. "Oh, I _like_ this, this I like. Where'd you get the hat?"

Nigma folded his arms and shrugged. "Had it around."

"Awesome! Right, then. Come on, Eddie—can I call you Eddie?—to start with, we go around the side of the building to this emergency exit that the night shift people tend to leave ajar during their smoke breaks."

"They get away with that?" Nigma wondered aloud, letting the nickname pass without comment so apparently J _could_. "Security's awfully tight."

"Well, we'll need to get through a lot of locked doors to get anywhere sensitive once we're inside, but that's what the glove's for, right? Other option's the front door, and I figured if you wanted to try to double-bluff human security you'd've approached somebody a _liiiittle_ less distinctive than my never-so-humble self."

Nigma hadn't written up his plans to go with the blueprints—J was pretty sure he was trying to make as few explicit statements of criminal intent as possible, just in case, which of course meant he wasn't going to commit the details to writing—which J had taken as invitation to wing it. After all, he'd been recruited for his breaking and entering skills, and as muscle, and most of all as a sort of psychological crutch so Nigma didn't have to go through with this alone.

He completely approved. In retrospect, staging his own grand comeback-tour vengeance-kick without anybody to lean on had been way, way too risky. But he hadn't wanted to drag anyone down with him if he screwed up. He hadn't been all that sure he was going to survive, back then, when he'd been trying to straight-out burn the Owl's kingdom down around him. There'd been the real possibility he'd go far enough that afterward he wouldn't so much _deserve_ to. He was lucky his friends hadn't given up on him.

Nigma faltered in dismay when they got to the designated door and found it closed, with no smokers in evidence, and no external lock or handle, nor anything to cyber-glove-hack, but J laughed and produced a very thin-bladed knife, which he shimmied into the seam where the flange along the outside of the door closed over the wall, and began to carefully lever it ajar.

"There's two different alarms attached to these doors," he explained as he worked. "One that triggers when the latch disengages—fire exit, right?—and one in the pneumatic arm at the top, that goes off when it stands open for more than a minute and a half.

"One of the smokers disabled the alarm in the latch a couple of years ago, so they didn't have to go all the way to the front for a cig, and they just leave it propped just a _little_ bit open around a notebook while they're out here, not enough for the arm-alarm to register, but enough to keep the bolt from catching. They figure it's fine because they're the only ones who know, and you can't use the fact that the alarm doesn't go off to get the door open.

"What they _don't_ know is, I set up a distraction and jammed the latch with chewing gum one time while they were out here having their smoke, and then came back later and disabled the locking mechanism just enough…that… _there_." He pulled the door open a few inches, listened, peered inside, waited until the camera that covered this part of the hall had swiveled past, then stuck his head in to check the hall as far as he could see in both directions. Empty. Yanked the portal wide, and gestured grandly for the mastermind to precede him. "Tah-dah!"

Nigma was giving him _such_ a look from under that green mask. "You did this last night?" he asked.

"No, I did this months ago, after the thing with the escaped mutant house pets that WE denied involvement in. Now get inside, timer's running down."

Nigma scooted obligingly, his face now set into thoughtful lines, and Jokester got the door closed behind them within the 90-second limit and disappeared the knife again before turning to Nigma expectantly, tugging his purple vinyl gloves on straighter as he watched the camera turn as far left as it would go and begin its slow pan back. They had eighteen seconds. "Where to first?"

"Main server room. Actually," Nigma corrected himself, scratching at his forehead under the edge of the thick wool derby with his left hand, while making a complicated series of decisive finger-twitches with his right that made the cyberglove light up in exciting patterns, and squinting at the results, "can you get us in someplace we can be out of sight while I finish breaking back into the system?"

By the face he was pulling, he'd brought up the blueprints in his head and was either trying to place the 'you are here' pin or figure out what the best nearby place to hide was; J spared him the trouble.

"Sure," he shrugged, and ducked them out of the camera's zone just before it caught them, hugged the wall as he approached the next one, waited another few seconds 'til _that_ one turned away, and moved on another few yards until they got to the side of the nearest door that had a keypad, and punched in four digits to gain access to…

"A janitor's closet," Nigma stated, very arch, not taking his eyes off his weird little hand-computer as J followed him inside. Clearly a major part of his role here was watching the little scientist's back, since apparently he didn't know how to do it for himself.

"It possesses a rich history in the annals of hiding places," J declared staunchly, pulling the door shut behind them and hitting a light switch. "It's _traditional._ "

"Cliché, you mean," said Nigma, with a cursory look around. " _What do you call a creepy midnight creature made of sticks and straw?_ " he muttered to himself, as he propped his shoulders against the nearest shelf and settled in to frowning and tapping at his glove-computer.

It looked like the five little divots along the inside edge of the wrist were additional controls for the ungloved hand, though J still didn't see how that could equal a full keyboard's worth of inputs. He guessed there was some trick to it.

Jokester made himself comfortable on a stack of plastic-wrapped toilet-paper-roll bales and drummed at nothing with his fingers as he smiled to himself. "Broom-closet-monster," he said, since neither of them was a scarecrow.

Though if Nigma had _actually_ meant that J didn't have a brain, he could just have _said_ so. J wouldn't mind. He knew he wasn't a genius, but even if he played the Fool, he wasn't an idiot, and he knew that, too.

"Huh?" his partner-in-righteous-crime jerked his eyes up, as though expecting to be attacked by said monster.

"Did I get it wrong?" J asked, slightly abashed at the possibility. "Your riddle," he prompted, when Nigma looked blank.

"Rid—oh. Oh! No, you got it right. Didn't even really hear myself asking. Old habit," the little scientist explained, only raising more questions. "Nervous habit," he admitted, wriggling his shoulders in embarrassment as he dropped his eyes back to his computer-glove, where a little holographic screen had flickered to life. "I'm a little tense."

"'Course you are," Jokester agreed, because _seriously_. That was kind of an awesome nervous habit but this was not the time to ask, or the time to laugh out loud. The little man seemed relieved when he didn't, and returned to his hacking with a new fervor.

"Okay," Nigma announced after a few quiet minutes, shoving away from the wall and hitting one last button with a flourish. "Cameras are mine. Let's go."


	2. Chapter 2

"Server room," J agreed, pulling the lever that unlocked the door from the inside, in accordance with some legal mandate about making sure nobody died in an auto-locking broom closet. "Wait, hang on." He held a finger to his lips for silence as the almost-midnight tread of a security guard tramped by, the steady, disaffected trudge of someone who has been walking for a while and will keep on walking for a while more, and not for the fun of it, or to get anywhere.

When the coast was clear again, J motioned Nigma after him, and pulled out his wonderful warhammer just in case. He didn't want to bludgeon anyone over the head if he could help it, since it wasn't like Wayne required his normal employees to _actually_ swear their souls to evil in exchange for a paycheck or anything, and a concussion could really screw up your whole month. But his toy had all kinds of fun features, and he wanted _all_ of them almost as close to hand as Eddie, creeping behind him and looping cameras as they reached them, was keeping his magic glove.

(If they were seen, they would be too utterly out of place to have a prayer of passing themselves off as supposed-to-be-there. J had gotten used to that being more-or-less constantly the case for himself by now, but he had Nigma pegged as the type to talk instead of fight and fight instead of run, at least so long as the other party wasn't actively trying to kill him. Since the researcher had a motive on record for attacking WE, he _really_ couldn't afford to be recognized, or getting away wouldn't matter; there'd be a warrant on his head tomorrow, and he'd have to run forever. J wouldn't wish that on anybody.

He was glad Nigma'd gone along with his suggestion about a suit, and even covered up his face and hair in the bargain. It helped his chances, and put him into the right furtive mindset. This was the best prank ever.)

Nigma tapped away at his wrist as they went, turning the cameras to angles that would allow them to slip through the surveillance net; their progress was still slow, but not as crawlingly so as if they'd had to try freestyle camera-dodging all the way. About halfway to their destination, he started to move with more confidence. They'd gotten to the bit he knew his way around. Good. Soon after that, J noticed his partner staring at his hammer.

The guy had startled a little when he produced something so _large_ by sleight-of-hand, but J'd already gotten him used to seeing rabbits pop out of hats by then, and that had passed quickly. This was something new—or, really, it was that look from the door again. Sort of disbelievingly impressed. And yeah, it was a _cool_ hammer, but still. J hadn't even showed off the bells and whistles yet. Or the more useful special features.

Nigma noticed him noticing, and when they finally had to stop and duck into a dead-end corridor only about three hundred feet from the server room, to avoid another guard patrol, found his tongue to whisper, "Where did you _get_ that?"

J spun the hammer over the back of his hand and let it thump onto his shoulder. "Present from the Insider," he whispered back, trying not to brag. Failing. "Said he liked my work."

"Can I see it?"

Judging by his expression, he wasn't interested in it so much as a weapon as as a _gizmo_ , so J wasn't _too_ worried about handing it over. Geek. "Don't take it apart or anything," he warned.

"I wouldn't, it's not mine. And this isn't the time. I just…" Nigma was surprised by the weight, and almost dropped it, but didn't, and brought the heavy end close to his face to study. He ran his non-cyber-gloved fingertips over the rim; tapped it with a fingertip, and gave a soundless little whistle. "I _thought_ I recognized that sheen. This is an Nth-metal alloy. Luthorcorp imports it from outer space; it's worth twenty times its weight in gold."

J rocked on his heels and had to stop himself from letting out a whistle of his own. He'd known it was a _nice_ piece of mechanism, and had always taken as careful care of it as you _could_ of a thing designed to be swung hard into other things, but there had to be over an ounce of the stuff at least making up each of the two rims.

Last he'd heard gold was going for three hundred thirty an ounce just for the metal value, which if you were going to take that comparison literally made the hammer worth well over ten thousand if sold for _scrap_ , which made it worth approximately three times everything else he had ever owned put together, very much _including_ optimistic black-market auction prices on his internal organs.

…good thing he didn't care about money. What the _heck?_

Nigma spun the hammer carefully on end, squinting at the alloy bounding both ends of the head and, if J knew scientists at all, wishing for equipment. "I've read about it—it has really bizarre properties as a superconductor; last I was paying attention there was something about _antigravity_. I got to play with a tiny sample in the university labs once, and it was the _strangest_ material I've ever…we can't even figure out its atomic number."

J huffed out a breath. "Okay, that's fascinating, in a really geeky way, but this isn't the time." He stuck out a hand. The guard was long gone. "Server room?"

Nigma slowly handed the hammer back. "It's just—" he said, and worried his lip. What, there was more?

"Don't stop there," J urged, and Nigma nodded acknowledgement, turned and motioned J to follow him back into the main corridor.

"I've always been a sort of hybrid programmer/engineer," he said, walking swiftly with his eyes on his wrist, while Jokester played watchman, "which was great for my work here, but the experimental electrical engineering field isn't all that big, really, and some people just have a distinctive style."

"So…?"

" _So_ Alexander Luthor made that. _Maybe_ somebody who works in the same lab, who's imitated his designs a lot, but I'm pretty sure it was Luthor."

Jokester rolled that around in his head, spinning the hammer-haft in his hands. "The million dollars' worth of Space Metal would tend to suggest that, yeah."

The Insider could be a lot of people, still, based on the rest of it, but J couldn't really see this kind of investment being smuggled out without the inside-man in question getting collared in the ensuing hullabaloo, and even if not, why waste the risk on him. Besides, the Insider had made hefty enough monetary contributions to various groups over the years that it only made _sense_ for him to be a millionaire. Billionaire. Whatever.

And if anyone in that tax bracket was going to throw his support behind people like Jokester and Central's Rogues, it'd be Luthor. He was practically part of the community _anyway_ , the way he kept facing down Ultraman and saving the world.

Though since he did it openly, under his own name, and also was fabulously wealthy and traded with space, people mostly thought of him as 'that rich science hero guy who is basically in charge of aliens' rather than 'a vigilante.' And J considered him more trustworthy than any other rich guy, anyway—twenty years ago, Luthor had been a Suicide Slum kid, and he wasn't ashamed to admit it. He funneled a lot of money and effort into youth programs and day care and soup kitchens and subsidized housing. Mostly Metropolis, but he'd launched a really good charity foundation that was operating in more cities every year. Not Gotham, though. Not yet.

So, now he knew the Insider's secret identity.

"I'll hafta thank him," J concluded, hooking the Million-Dollar Space Hammer over one shoulder. He wondered how Luthor would take it if Jokester let himself into his corporate headquarters and commandeered himself a meeting—assuming he _could_ , of course; Luthor's company was well known for their security installations, and he didn't know the ground there like he did in Gotham. Might take more time than it was worth.

"I should've applied to Luthorcorp," Nigma sighed. "But, you know, Gotham's my hometown, and Waynetech had a better starting salary and what _looked_ like a good benefits package—it isn't, by the way—and…" he shrugged. "Too late now."

Because of the seven years left on his ten-year noncompete clause, which meant he couldn't work in research and development again even if anyone was willing to hire him. And Jokester was pretty sure that was what they were _really_ here avenging, because no matter what you took from a guy, so long as you left him the ability to _move on_ from the loss _…_

Seriously. Wayne. Such an idiot.

J reached out with his empty hand and patted the smaller man bracingly on the back.

Nigma let out an involuntary huff of air, shot J a dirty look, and then came to a stop. "We're here."

The server room was filled with huge humming boxes, with three recognizable computers up at the front. J looked around, saw no way he could be useful unless Nigma wanted things smashed, and took up a guard position by the entrance, ready to bop any interlopers on the head.

"Keeping a low profile," Nigma reminded him, as he took up a station at one of the machines, plugging some kind of data-disc-thing into a slot in the side. J should learn something about computers at this rate; they were obviously getting more important all the time.

He drew himself up and did an aggrieved voice. "I can guard us without getting us caught."

"I know you can," Nigma said, typing away much faster now that he had a real keyboard. "Why do you think you're the one I asked along?"

"Because I wouldn't expect you to pay me for my time?"

"Okay, yes, that is a factor. But I actually…respect your work? You show up in the news. Some of what you do I can't figure out, but some of it is you covering the places where the system lets people down, and some of it is just…pointing out where the problems are. Have I got that right?"

Jokester grinned, swept a little bow. "It is the duty of art to hold a mirror up to life."

Nigma's grin was thin and distant. "Duty. Hah, yeah."

It wasn't mockery, or at least, if it was it wasn't aimed at Jokester, not really. "Duty _definitely,_ " he said. "What, doesn't science have its own charge?"

The grin twisted. "It's supposed to, sure. I mean, I was never out to save the world. I just wanted to be on the cutting edge. Doing the newest, hardest, smartest things. Everything is just another puzzle to solve, when you get down to it.

"But science—is supposed to be about new frontiers, solving problems and breaking down boundaries and working your way through all the misleading data and easy false assumptions to the _truth._ No matter how convoluted, you'll get there eventually, if you keep trying. There's always an answer.

"You don't lie about your data, or intentionally bias your outcomes or your models, or discard evidence you don't like. Or you're setting yourself up to fail. That's the problem. All the best funding comes from corporate, and they don't care about true. They just care about what'll give them an advantage."

J wished he could think of something to cheer his partner up, but then Nigma shook himself. "I should concentrate," he declared, and began typing even faster.

When the next guard patrol came strolling along, J hissed out a warning and Nigma stopped working so the sound of keystrokes wouldn't prompt investigation.

"Hey, Ed?" he asked, once he'd sounded the all-clear and the clacking rose up again. "Hate to rush you, but how much longer?"

Nigma made a puffing, tutting sound that probably translated as 'who even knows.' "You know," he said absently, "if you're going to keep calling me 'Ed,' I should get to ask: what's your real name? I mean, it can't be Jokester."

J laughed, and the sound rebounded eerily off the hard surfaces of the terminals. "No, I guess it can't." Noticing that his co-conspirator had stopped working to crane his head around expectantly, he flapped a gloved hand as grandly as showmanship could contrive. "The cognomen will do."

Nigma's forehead furrowed a little, but he went back to his work without arguing.

J probably shouldn't have dodged the question, really, but he hated explaining to people that no, he didn't remember anything until not-quite-seven-years-ago, did not have a real name, could not vote or swap anecdotes about childhood. He was okay with all of that—if he were different, he wouldn't be himself—but people got weird. Most of his memory being a giant hole tended to make them more leery of relying on his judgment than _any_ amount of proven lunacy. Which was weird, but there you were. Much better to be a man of mystery.

If he was going to go through that with Ed Nigma, it was not going to be in the middle of a high-risk operation in enemy territory. J occasionally displayed traces of common sense, thank you.

"Okay," the man in the tailcoat murmured, as the last server beeped obligingly. "Now we need to get to the labs."

J nodded, slipped out the door for some quick reconnaissance, and came back to motion the chief conspirator into the hall. "Got a preferred route?" he whispered, as Nigma joined him, half his attention back on his glowing wrist.

An abstracted shake of the head. "You know the guard routines better. Your call."

There were, as it happened, a _lot_ of labs in this building, but both of them had the blueprints in their heads and Nigma knew where they were going, so it wasn't a problem. They got there without being spotted, and then it was but a moment's work to convince the lock that they were allowed in.

And…huh.

When J heard 'lab,' he thought of the old Hammer Horror Frankenstein first. Nothing against science, just…no direct experience with it, either, at least at the developmental end. Not even high school chemistry. There'd been a mad scientist or so, and of course those mutant house pets Waynetech insisted _they_ hadn't been illegally experimenting on, but that was it. So he thought mysterious bubbling beakers and those crackling electric coil things, and if he went to the trouble of being more realistic, his mental image was more or less a hospital room, with tables instead of a bed.

This was not that. It _was_ mostly white, presumably for the same reason lab coats were white—it showed dirt, so you'd notice if it got dirty—but there were scorch marks on some of the counters, and that was the main smell in the air—solder, hot silicon, hot plastic, a hint of methane. There were countertops cluttered with microchips, paper files untidily put away, and mechanical articles and odds and ends not put away at all. Mysterious instruments large and small were spaced around the room, some with canvas covers and some without. Brightly colored post-it-notes marked several cabinet doors.

It was, on the whole, the most _human_ place he'd seen anywhere in the Waynetech building.

"Jeff did go home," Nigma sighed in relief. "I was worried he'd still be in here. Guy does not _sleep._ "

"I know the type," J agreed. "So, what are we going after?"

Nigma cast jaundiced eyes across the counters. "Pretty much everything," he decided.

This turned out to mean J sticking things in a large cardboard box while Nigma broke into _these_ computers, too.

"I actually know the word 'cognomen,' you know," Nigma informed him, sitting back from his screen with a small sigh, apparently waiting for something to search, or compile, or who knew what—J should _really_ learn about computers.

"'course you do," J returned breezily, layering what were probably important papers haphazardly in the box to make sure the machines didn't break each other. "You went to school. You're the brainy guy here." His 1972 edition of the _Gotham Tribune Readers' Dictionary of Misunderstood, Misused, and Mispronounced Words_ had defined it as meaning either a surname or 'a distinguishing name, ex.: a nickname.' There was ambiguity there, was what he was saying.

Nigma snorted, hit a single key. "Mm-hm."

Ooh, sarcasm.

"Why 'Jokester,' anyway? Joker seems more obvious."

"Yeah. Lacks distinctiveness! Besides, jokester emphasizes the playing of pranks and tricks." According to his _Gotham Tribune Readers' Dictionary._

Nigma's shrug allowed that this made sense. "You lose the 'wild card' connotation, though," he pointed out.

This was true. "Well, what about you?" J asked. "What would you call yourself?"

Nigma's eyes narrowed at the screen and he answered absently. "Mmm…I like _Cypher,_ but that's also a synonym for zero. I could go with The Question."

"Taken," J pointed out. There was a faceless man in Hub City whose specialty seemed to be breaking into people's houses and beating them up until they promised to confess to their crimes or change their votes, or whatever it was he wanted them to do.

"Yeah, I know." Nigma's frown made his nose wrinkle. J suppressed all rabbit jokes. "Puzzler and Riddler are kind of weak. It should be just one word, though, or I could be, I don't know, Captain Code? Shut up, I know, that's practically already taken, I'd be a laughingstock. So, even though it's obvious…I'd probably use Enigma." There was a tone in his voice—distraction, with only half his attention on what he was saying, but also an itch to launch into explanations or justifications, so J made a polite inquiring sound, and explain Ed did. "From when I was a kid, my hero was Alan Turing—you know, who beat the Enigma machine? Father of modern computing."

J nodded vague recognition. "He was gay, wasn't he?"

Nigma tore his eyes away from the screen long enough to shoot him a scowl, though his fingers didn't stop clattering away. "What are you, a yenta? He was a _genius._ A persecuted genius. I got over wanting to be just like him when I got old enough to realize that being persecuted is actually really inconvenient and gets in the way of the creative process…aha! Gotcha. Wayne codes some of his most important firewalls himself, and he's brilliant and all but he's not a _programmer_ , so it's actually worse security than if he delegated."

"Except anyone he delegated to could turn on him," Jokester pointed out. Not that he wanted to defend Bruce 'Heartless Billionaire' Wayne, but he'd been jousting with Wayne off and on for a few years now, and was beginning to get a grasp on the man's paranoia. And, well, he'd _just_ watched Nigma take down the security he'd put up himself like he was wiping away cobwebs.

"Hm," Nigma allowed. "Anyway, when I still thought persecution was cool I was a little bit of a cracker—I didn't really hurt anybody, I don't think, but I liked to break into secure servers and mess around so they knew someone'd been there. I couldn't resist calling myself 'Enigma,' but since that was basically my real name I didn't want to scrawl it like a lot of hackers do their handles, so my signature thing was to leave a riddle.

"Dumb little things, y'know, like, 'What's another word for a computer virus?' where the answer was 'A terminal illness.'"

Jokester sniggered, and Nigma shot him another, less venomous look. "Hey, it was funny. If you were a teenage hacker. Ten years ago."

"Hey, I laughed, didn't I? I'm not exactly known for my discerning and tasteful sense of humor, but hey." He cast his eyes over the countertops. Nothing prototype-like remained. "I think I'm done here."

"Awesome. Give me another minute…"

Jokester hefted the box, determining that it was light enough to be carried under one arm, and wishing he'd known he was getting beast-of-burden duty; he'd have brought a better one-handed weapon. Maybe just his red-paint handgun. You could buy a lot of time while people worked out that they weren't actually bleeding.

"Ready," Nigma confirmed.

And one of the big pieces of equipment shuddered to life, grew arms, stripped off its own dust cover, and lunged at both of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the state of computer technology in this story is kind of anachronistic, partly because DC and partly because Wayne Enterprises an partly because genius major character and partly because nyah. 
> 
> The general public is only a little bit ahead of where they were in the real 80s, at the dawn of the personal computer era, but major institutions and corporations are way ahead of that, and (more significantly) already were in the seventies. Because in comicbookland the gap between cutting edge and general distribution is generally absolutely _cavernous_ , in service of not writing a full-bore sci-fi setting in spite of the tech manifestly available to the elite and crazy. Prosperity gap, brother. >>
> 
> Speaking of which, the price of gold has more than tripled since 1985, when it was $327/oz, because luxury commodities markets. Ed actually drastically undervalued the hammer.


	3. Chapter 3

The attacking thing was bulky and metallic, with a single wide red band that seemed to serve it as eyes set into a low hump on the top that he guessed was a sort of a head. The arms numbered six, and the pair that had gone for Jokester and Nigma were cruel, hooked things that seemed to belong on a preying mantis.

"Lucinda Two!" Ed shouted, diving under the nearest lab table just in time.

J squinted out from under his own steel table as it lurched forward on a pair of tank-like treads, the metal arms making a faint, ominous clicking sound. "Lucy who?"

"No, Lucinda Two. The old lab manager—she retired the year I started here, fierce old lady. Guess what her name was?"

J laughed. "Lucinda!"

The robot recognized her name, but this merely meant she let out a high-pitched trill composed of beeps and focused her hunt entirely on his table.

"No points awarded for that guess!" Nigma hissed, cowering under his own.

"What, are we on a game show now—whoah!" Lucinda had rolled up the aisle between workstations and turned with startling dexterity, flanking both their hiding places, and they flung themselves in opposite directions to avoid her.

"Bravo-Charlie-Six-Niner-Foxtrot!" Nigma popped upright to shout, with no result other than becoming the sole focus of Lucinda's wrath. His face went the color of cheese as the second pair of arms, chunky things lined with five rifle barrels each, swung down to target him.

Then Lucinda lurched sideways, as Jokester rammed a heavy steel-topped workbench into her with all his might. One of her sharp-cornered shoulders went through a wall, and the stream of bullets was diverted into the front of a cabinet marked _Acid Solutions_ and (in pink) _Charlie stay out._ Both men dived for cover behind a barricade J had built by flipping two of the tables up onto their edges.

"I don't _believe_ this," Nigma grumbled over the sound of a hail of bullets bouncing off stainless steel. "They didn't manage to purge my access to the computer system, but somebody took the time to _change Lucinda's override codes_ from the ones I know?"

"Looks like it." The significance, it seemed to J, wasn't so much the failure to keep him out of a system he clearly knew back to front, as the fact that one of his former coworkers had _bothered_ to make sure he wouldn't be able to shut the robot down if he broke in. It suggested he'd been expected. "Seriously, though, why is there a giant killer robot living in the lab? Even after the mutant poodle, I didn't think Wayne was this flavor of crazy."

"Oh, she's not _his_. Sort of the lab mascot, really. She was a prototype, but the government didn't pick up the contract, so after the project was deep-sixed they just kept her around. Giving her new upgrades is sort of a bragging-rights thing."

"So you're saying _your coworkers_ are giant-killer-robot crazy!"

"Hey, I worked on her too!" Nigma paused, and added with careful dignity, "Anyway, they're not my coworkers anymore. Duck!"

"Goose!" J hollered back, throwing himself flat. Something larger than a bullet sang through the space where he'd been.

It appeared to be a plastic buzz saw. The sound of gunfire ramped up, but J had to take a second to ask, "Why did the giant killer robot just shoot a plastic knife at me?"

"Because she's not a _killer_. She's a giant toy. She only shoots rubber bullets."

Which explained why he'd been taking the persistent gunfire so calmly. "Do you know how much damage those can do at close range? Nonlethal is not the same as harmless! As the lobster said to the lobster-pot."

And actually, you took one of these in the head or an especially squishy organ, you _could_ die. A rubber bullet, that was, not a lobster trap. Though those too, he guessed, if swung hard enough.

"Yes, I know," Ed said sourly. "But as long as we're behind this table, they aren't a problem."

J fully expected the result of that statement to be the six-armed self-driving death tank charging the barrier. Instead, there was a moment's pause, a chunking of machinery, and then the fusillade began again, this time with a different set of impact sounds—higher, and clearer, and far more menacing. "Those aren't rubber bullets," Jokester said. Probably unnecessarily.

Nigma looked appalled. "She'll wreck the whole lab!"

J laughed. "You don't even work here anymore!"

"Well, no, but…"

J reached out past the edge of his barricade while Lucinda was concentrating fire at the other end, and picked up a heavy metal stapler, indented in one side by a bullet. Ran his thumb around that dimple in the metal. "Sometimes I wonder why I even bother trying to tell jokes!" he called out.

" _What?_ " From the tone, it sounded like Nigma was worried Lucinda's upgrade in armament had given him such a shock he had collapsed into a personal crisis about the purpose of humor and was going to be no further use.

"Because the world is so much funnier than anything I could come up with!" He throttled laughter back enough to give himself some spare oxygen for movement, flung himself into the aisle, beaned Lucinda Two in the visual plating with the stapler, grabbed one of the stainless-steel lab stools by the legs, lowered his head, and charged.

Lucinda's shots riddled his impromptu shield into ever smaller pieces, winnowing away the heavy plastic seat and then battering at the frame with ricochets that screamed like panicked seagulls, until when Jokester reached her he swung the battered frame of the stool up into the underside of the machine gun arm so hard that it jolted up to pockmark the ceiling, buckled steel contorted around it. And in that tiny window he let go of his shield, grabbed hold of Lucinda's chassis where the gun joined it, and swung himself up.

He braced himself in the shoulder joint for the left-hand gun-arm, with one arm wrapped around the base of one of the mantis-stabbers. The low dome of the head made it hard to get any of the right arms around to him, so the main threat here was the left arm with the pincers. He dodged a grab. "Okay, now what do I do?"

Lucinda let out a shrill of annoyance and fired off a whole spread of toy buzzsaw blades, one of which Nigma ducked aside from as it came at his face, but he didn't stop gaping at Jokester.

"What the—you're crazy!"

"Like anyone sane would even be here! Tell me her weak points!"

Nigma shook off his shock. "The shoulder joints! Linda added some armor, but if you can follow the wiring bundle at sixteen degrees left of the top center you can get at the CPU and motor!"

"Right!" J called back.

Nigma kept shouting, it sounded like explaining where sixteen degrees was in terms of a clock, but at that point Lucinda put forth a burst of effort and noisily shattered the buckled steel stool-frame that had been fouling up her gun arm. One large jagged piece of metal flew toward Jokester. Perfect!

The shard cut straight through his glove and into his hand a little as he caught it, but he didn't let that stop him from jamming it into the joint in front of him as deep as it would go.

There was a faint sound of grinding metal, but the limb did not stop, let alone the whole machine.

Eddie knew what he was talking about, J was sure, and this was the right spot. Which meant the problem was….

"Hammer!" he called out.

"Wha—oh!" Nigma scrambled across the open space, arms up to protect his head, but Lucinda neglected to target him, distracted by her passenger. The scientist grabbed up the wonderful, expensive confabulation of science, which seemed completely unharmed by the chaos, and for an instant didn't seem to know what he should do with it. It was almost as tall as he was, after all.

Then he set his jaw, placed his hands close together near the bottom of the handle, and _spun_.

He released after one and a half rotations, and the hammer spiraled through the air, arced over J's head just low enough for him to snag. Then, he locked his legs around the base of one gyrating limb, took his weapon in both hands, drew it back over his head, and brought it down on the protruding metal sliver.

He'd planned to somersault off once Lucinda was dead, and probably do a fancy landing and go all _ta-dah!,_ but instead she exploded.

The force of it threw him against a wall, and he must have briefly blacked out, because he woke up to a slightly singed Ed Nigma crouching over him and saying, "I can't believe you took out an overengineered war droid with _no actual weapons_."

Excuse him, Space Hammer was totally a weapon. "Well, you know what they say, when all you have is a hammer…"

Eddie hauled at his arm. "Get up, get _up._ "

J got up. He still had hold of his hammer; Ed had retrieved the slightly dented box. Security had to be almost here, but luckily the door was now impassable and the air was thick with dust, lowering visibility. There was a hole in the wall large enough to drive a small truck into. A good performer knew to scram before they gave him the hook.

"So, track team?" J asked as they ran. The fuzziness was already wearing off.

"What?"

"That throw there, against Lucinda. Beautiful. I figured you did hammerthrow in high school or something."

"Have you _looked_ at me? I was on the _chess_ team! I was the strongest player on it by the end of freshman year, actually."

J thought about this. "High school," he decided, "is weird." He suspected that, like having parents, it was one of those nigh-universals of the common experience he was never going to really grasp.

Eddie opened his mouth, closed it most of the way again, and after a few seconds of saving his breath to run finally said, "You are not wrong."

They made it out of the facility with alacrity, and without encountering anyone. Since the alarms were already blaring, they were free to take the first emergency exit they saw, and from there they scurried up alleyways and side streets until they fetched up beside the river, in the shadow of the paper mill, where they stopped to catch their breath.

"I forgot to leave a riddle," Ed said, after his panting had slowed.

He didn't seem to be injured. J ran a self-evaluation—couple of bullet creases, some aches in his head and back, minor burns, the cut on his hand, might need stitches, various clothing damage, definitely would. Shiny purple gloves, a loss. All in all, fine.

"It's okay. I'm sure Waynetech will be bewildered enough." When that didn't seem to have cheered Eddie up any he added, "Nobody can be fully prepared for acts of robot. Prob'ly not even Tesla or Turing! In fact, I bet neither of them would've come out of a robot fight so good. Well. Maybe Tesla."

The sum total of what J knew about Nicola Tesla was that he had made lightbulbs light up after burying them in the ground and nobody knew how, that he was afraid of pearls, that Thomas Edison had ripped him off, and that he'd once built a death ray. Also, he'd been born in Europe. Ted thought that was very important for some reason.

"You…" Ed's voice was only just audible over the noise of the chugging factory and of the river. "You probably think it's lame. Looking up to a guy who just worked on codes, and wound up isolated and destroyed by his own mistakes just as much as because the world is full of assholes."

J shook his head. "Nah, I get it. I've got plenty of heroes. Joey Grimaldi, king of clowns. Arachne. Frederick Douglass. Emiliano Zapatas. Germaine Tillion. Robin Hood. And, you know, one guy I kind of look up to said, 'A hero is someone who understands the responsibility that comes with his freedom.'"

"That's…a different kind of hero," Ed said, his throat sounding kind of dry. "That's…I'm not looking to be a vigilante. I can barely find the money to take care of _myself!_ "

"Oh, well I had an idea about that," J replied easily. "I know it's not lab research, but I know some guys looking to sell the city's only freelance computer repair business. Just to keep you on your feet, y'know? And I'm thinking…" he gave his hammer a spin. "When I get a word with Luthor about this little number, I'll drop your name, hm?"

"Noncompete clause," Ed said, and now he sounded positively _rusty._

J made an indelicate noise and clapped the other guy on the shoulder. "Eddie, the man is going around mailing clown-themed vigilantes _unsolicited giant mechanical mallets_ worth more than Lambhorginis. I seriously doubt slipping work under-the-table to _brilliant_ engineers who've been _victimized_ by abuse of contract law is beyond the pale."

A rusty gust of laughter. "Point." He pulled away from the hand on his shoulder. "So you trying to recruit me, here?"

"Uh…no?" Frankly, well as they'd worked together, if J was going to go partner-hunting he'd lean toward the brawnier end, or at any rate somebody at least as tough as he was in a fight. They'd be an okay duo but their strong points had too much overlap; Eddie would be a great team with somebody who could hit like a piledriver but had no sense of strategy, at least once he brushed up his situational awareness. "You should do what you think is right, man. That's what we were doing here, yeah? I just don't like not helping."

"I thought you said you _didn't_ fall for every sob story you hear."

Eddie had gone gruff, now, trying to cover up his attack of emotions. He was _tiny_ and telegraphing everything he was feeling with both hands even as he turned his back to hide his face, so the effect was kind of adorable, but J liked him too much to embarrass him worse by bringing that up.

"Well, I try not to, but there's a reason my rep says I do."

Ed took another couple of seconds of silence to get his emotions under control again, then conceded, "…fair enough." He turned back to face J with a little crooked smile. "Also, I'm going to screw with your little fantasy about educated people learning everything, because I have no idea who Emiliano Zapatas is."

J grinned. "Mexican revolutionary. Very into land reform. Held his home state through two or three changes of government, and died because he trusted the wrong person. He's pretty famous."

"Huh." Ed shot him a considering look under the brim of his hat, and hefted the bag. "You sure you don't have a B.A. in something?" The corner of his mouth twitched up. "Something _useless_ , obviously."

And yay, he was being made fun of, that meant they were friends now. Well, obviously. You couldn't commit industrial sabotage and fight giant robots together without making friends. "I don't believe in things being useless," J declared expansively. "And no," he admitted, closing in a little, wobbling back and forward on his toes. "Not _sure_."

Nigma blinked, just once, and then comprehension spread. "Oh. _Oh._ So—that really is your name?"

Jokester rolled his shoulders, "Only one that's ever stuck." Jabbed an elbow into Eddie's bicep (hey, wasn't his fault his new friend was short) and swayed back out of range of his immediate retaliation, grinning. "You can call me J, though."

Ed snorted, hitched up the box of stolen property, and made for the street, shoving J with his shoulder on the way by. "Come on. We've got to get at the backup servers upstate before somebody thinks to make a copy of my data and hand-carry it out."

J raised his eyebrows, but he came with. They really should've planned to hit both places simultaneously, maybe a timed electro-magnet burst thingymabob on the northerly place. This was what came of not trusting your allies and sharing the whole plan. "You got a car?" he asked.

Ed jingled a ring of keys, and Jokester picked up his pace a little, coming abreast.

"Can I drive?"

Enigma glanced at him sidelong, up from under the brim of his marvelous hat. "I don't know. _Can_ you drive?"

J planted a hand over his heart. "I am hurt. Wounded! Yes, I can drive. I can drive _fast._ "

Ed pursed his lips, stumping along at double speed, and then flicked the keys at J. "Don't kill us," he directed.

J jingled his prize happily. He _loved_ country roads. He might be a city boy to his very core, but city driving was frequently made deeply less than fun by all the _other_ drivers wanting to be where you were. And by the one-way system, which was bad enough in the parts of the city that were more or less on a grid, but when you had to deal with one-way streets in _Oldtown…_ "I _never_ hurt my friends."

Ed Nigma smiled back, ironic and dry and _warm_. "You'd better not. Hey," he added, as he led the way to his vehicle. "Do you think Luthorcorp has giant killer robots in _their_ labs?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 'Ted' was mentioned _aaall_ the way back in 'Mask of Circumstance' as J's uni-student friend who likes to go on about his history/music double major. Due to him and to eclectic reading habits, J has extremely spotty general knowledge--for example, in this story he knows who Tesla is and is aware of Tesla coils, without knowing what they're called.
> 
> The Neo-Zapatistas won't stage their revolt until several years after this, so J isn't thinking of that movement when he admires Zapatas, though he'll almost certainly support that, too. Of the two options received from antiquity, I've always favored the version of the story of Arachne where she stands on principle, and Athena is an absolute bastard. Germaine Tillion is notable among the Allied spies in occupied France; Frederick Douglass ('Narrative of the Life of') was one of the great abolitionists. XD The quote on heroes is one attributed to Bob Dylan.
> 
> Also, the price of gold has tripled since the eighties; Ed drastically _under_ valued the space hammer. I've nerfed Nth metal, in the assumption that most of its insane number of powers are things Thanagarian technology has worked out how to do _using_ it, rather than stuff that the metal itself just magically allows. Because if the hammer could fly you know J would ride it, cackling witchily all the while, and if he got super-strength and super-healing from it that would be absurd.


End file.
